Different mobile applications may provide various multimedia services such as video conferencing, television broadcast, video on-demand, multi-player gaming, etc on User Equipment (UEs). Some of these applications may provide the same content to a number of application subscribers. For example, if a live sporting event is to be transmitted over a video-on-demand application, the same content may be transmitted to a large number of subscribers who have subscribed to watch the live sporting event. Similarly, there may be other occasions during which the same content may be viewed by a number of subscribers.
Usually such transmission of duplicate content may lead to sub-optimal use of network resources. In case the number of subscribers and simultaneous service consumption increases, network-resource-demand may exceed the available network capacity. This is likely to choke the network affecting service quality of individual or group of users. In order to use network resources effectively in such a scenario, 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) proposes Multicast Broadcast Multimedia Services (MBMS) service mechanism for transmitting same data from one data source (eNB) to several relevant target UEs. MBMS may Multicast services as well as Broadcast services for transmitting data to various users.
However, the 3GPP MBMS specification fails to provide mechanism to identify relevant group of MBMS users based on service and content for effective radio resource use.